The Watering Campaign
by Meriem Clayton
Summary: Jack considers whether to act on Daniel's inebriated advice about Sam. Somewhat spoilerish for Season 8.


This story was written strictly for the purpose of entertainment. No attempt has been made to copyright any characters which may not have been originally created by the author, and no profit is made from this work of fiction. Any original characters and the stories themselves are the property of the author.

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Jack O'Neill mopped the sweat off his forehead with the tail of his t-shirt and looked at his brown lawn. Any day now, they were going to be told they had to stop watering their lawns and he was determined to get his as close to health as possible before that happened. The water shortage from the prolonged drought had turned everything brown. At last he had it so wet that there were little riverlets on the sidewalk. That was when he stopped. Teal'c and Daniel were picking him up in about a half an hour and he really wanted to be spared Daniel's lecture #57 about how he had to show "water responsibility" and not hog resources.

Thinking about Daniel and his lawn reminded him of the last time they had gone to a pub together for darts and a couple of beers. Daniel wasn't the cheap date he had once called him when it came to alcohol consumption but he was still entertainingly loopy after the second one, provided he didn't eat much of anything first. Jack was ashamed to admit that every once in awhile he had felt the need of a loopy Daniel and conspired to keep him away from food. Once in a while, this did backfire on him. Daniel sometimes was inspired by a beer or two to give Jack unwanted advice and the last pub visit had been one of those occasions. Daniel had switched to ice water, but it was too late at that point. He was definitely feeling uninhibited. "The thing is Jack," he paused and straightened Jack's collar, "I can call you Jack and not General?"

"Geez Daniel," Jack said, "you've never called me anything but Jack." He rescued the glass of water from nearly being knocked over by the expansive gesture that had accompanied the last statement.

"Whatever. A life is like a lawn." Daniel had paused then, absolutely blown away by the deepness of that thought, apparent only to him. Something started him up again and he continued, "Yup. You got to care for it. Fertilize it and water it. In balance of course, Jack, 'cause you can OVERcare for something."

"Daniel, buddy, don't want to burst your bubble but that is not exactly an original thought," Jack said gently. He was glad that Daniel had switched to water.

"I am NOT done with it, General Jack," Daniel continued, seeming to take offense. "Now, YOUR life is definitely a very unwatered lawn. No water at all. No siree. Not for months and years."

"Ya think?" Jack asked. Daniel had definitely gone from being a guilty entertainment to a real pain in the butt. The man had the capacity to do that in a nanosecond. This whole conversation had started treading water and was going into the deep end way too fast.

"You see, you got to let somebody love you, Jack," Daniel said and then started singing, very badly, some line from a song about how you had to let somebody love you. As if he were a speaker at a podium, he picked up his glass of water and took a small sip, before he continued. "Now Sam is ALL ready to love you. She is, man, General Jack man."

"I think it's time for you to go home, get in the shower, let the water run over you, and sober up," Jack said, taking Daniel by the arm and leading him toward the door. He called out to the Jaffa who had drifted over to watch some dart players. "Teal'c, I think we need to get Daniel home."

Jack tried to shut down the memory of that pub conversation as he turned the water off and went in the house to shower before his friends arrived. Was his life really a brown lawn? And more to the point, was the impact of years of friendship with Daniel really a good thing or a bad thing? He thought about the guilty copy he had of that chick flick, "Water Like Chocolate," under the couch cushion when in the past he would have unashamedly been watching something like "On the Waterfront."

Daniel kept putting him back in touch with a civilian point of view, a sensitive, artsy civilian point of view. It worked for Daniel didn't it? The boy was all over the place emotionally and really seemed to be well-adjusted for it. Jack had his feelings all bottled up and had only admitted to himself caring for three women, Sara, Lara, and Sam. He'd blown it with the first one, left the second one, and never managed to do anything about it with the third one. So she was under his command. If she felt the way about him the way he felt about her, they'd find a solution. It was time to finally cross the Rubicon even if he ended up in the water.

He went to pick up the phone and noticed that his hand had a smear of mud from where water had been trickling from the junction of the hose and the nozzle. Detouring into the bathroom to wash off the mud, he zoned out with his hands under the warm water. Hideous visions of what could go wrong chased each other in his head. "No," he said out loud, "the orders have already been cut. Just do it."

He returned to the kitchen, picked up the phone, and dialed her number. She took a long time to answer and he almost hung up but finally there she was sounding out of breath and, to him, like the sexiest thing he had ever heard. Without any preamble, he blurted out, "Sam, I'd like to come by later this evening and talk to you about watering my lawn." He knew it wasn't a mistake when she responded to that crazy request with a simple, "I'll be waiting."


End file.
